On the morning of September 11th 2001, as I watched the news, I was filled with gut wrenching shock and a sense of surreal-ness followed by great rage & anger, as I watched helpless victims choose to fall to their deaths rather than be burned alive or suffocate to death, followed by the buildings falling down. As I’ve watched the documentary replay fifteen years later, those same emotions are still there.

We’ve spent a lot of time mourning the loss and being angry at the enemy, as we most certainly should. But we also need to remember and celebrate the heroes like the Police, Fire, Port Authority officers and all the rescue workers. And what some have called the “Boat Heroes” who ferried 500,000 people off of lower Manhattan in less than five hours.

The world still has too many terrorists. It needs more heroes. Heroes are average ordinary men and women who’ll remain calm in chaos and do whatever they can to save people’s lives, like leading over seventy people down flights of stairs to eventual safety, before the buildings collapsed. Our country was built on heroes. It’s saved by heroes and it needs more heroes.

There’s been a lot talk about standing or not standing for the National Anthem recently. This was started by a mediocre quarterback who had one really good year in the NFL and refused to stand for the National Anthem in protest during a preseason football game. While we are not a perfect people, we are certainly a lot better than we have been. We’re getting better all the time and we’re better than most other countries with all the freedoms our constitution affords us. While there are plenty of other countries that are very fine places to live, go to any of them and see if you can have the quality and quantity of life you enjoy here in America. We’re privileged to live in America. And there’s a lot of good things to be said for that, that some people forget.

I stand for our Flag and the National Anthem thinking about and honoring all the heroes we’ve had in the past, those heroes we need today and those we’ll need in the future. The price of freedom isn’t free. It’s paid for by heroes. #StandfortheFlagandtheNationalAnthem